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理工系大学院生のための学術英語

Academic Listening

Academic Listening #5: Practice — A Real MIT Lecture

中級 / Intermediate8 分

Academic Listening · Part 5 of 7

Authentic, unscripted academic speech. Your only job is to count doors.

Controlled sentences are training wheels. Now try genuine, unscripted academic speech: the opening of an MIT first-year lecture, published free by MIT OpenCourseWare. The speaker is Professor Donald Sadoway and the subject is solid-state chemistry, so the terminology will be familiar to most engineering students.

Lec 1, MIT 3.091SC Introduction to Solid State Chemistry, Fall 2010 — Donald Sadoway, MIT OpenCourseWare (CC BY-NC-SA). Turn captions on only after your first listening.

Your task — the first five minutes only. Listen straight through once with captions off. Do not try to understand the chemistry. Your only job is to count doors.

Make five columns on a sheet of paper — orientation, sequence, emphasis, contrast, summary — and put a mark in a column every time you hear a phrase doing that job. Write the phrase if you catch it; a mark alone is still a success.

How did you do?

Eight or more marks: your ear is tuned. Listen again and write the actual phrases, then compare them with the five cards in Part 2.

Three to seven: normal and healthy for a first attempt. Listen again at 0.75× speed and you should roughly double the count. Then try once more at normal speed — it will feel noticeably easier, which is the whole point.

Two or fewer: you are listening for content words. Try again with one instruction only: ignore every noun. Wait for “now”, “so”, “let me”, “the point is”, “however”.

An opening lecture is unusually rich in orientation signposts because the speaker is setting up a whole course. A conference talk compresses the same moves into about ninety seconds.

Next · Part 6 of 7Five Traps to Be Careful WithThe five things that defeat strong readers of English in a live lecture. ← Part 4: Practice — Name the Signpost

Academic Listening series, Shimane University.

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